Innovation4Care

Published 30/04/2010

Last updated 14/09/2012

Healthcare regions from Denmark, Norway and Sweden participated together with innovation consultants from these countries and with Danish-Swedish MVA as the project manager. Crowdsourcing was established to channel suggestions and ideas from employees but also from industry and the public, to provide input and collective decisions on innovation projects.

Innovation4Care

An interactive web-based tool was developed by Hybrid State AB and implemented at the website innovation4care.com. This website had close to 10,000 unique visitors from September 2008 to April 2010.

Sixteen crowdsourcing challenges were performed during 12 months. More than 3000 individuals took part, of which 440 actively participated in the challenges, which lasted from 24 hours to 2 weeks. For example: Central Denmark Region asked the public about the development of a new healthcare plan, Region Skåne performed 4 projects, including develpment of new practical guidelines for the Ambulance and Catastrophe unit, and Helse Bergen performed crowdsourcing around Nutrition and Health, an area that also became a focus for their industry reference group.

As important as the crowdsourcing activities were the experience exchange and benchmarking between the Nordic healthcare regions, with two or all three regions participating in reciprocal study tours where the innovation systems, as well as ideas under development, were presented.

Recommendations from the project and the final conference participants: Speed, transparency and flexibility; Test new tools and allow learning by doing; Work towards a less hierarchical and more open culture; Try to improve scaleability via Nordic cooperation; Co-development and procurement of innovations appear possible between Nordic regions.